fix performance when using drop-shadows on OSX

Question

For the previous several versions, yEd becomes impossibly slow to use on OSX as soon as any object in the diagram has a drop-shadow added.  With a drop shadow, moving an object has several seconds of lag, making editing a diagram nearly impossible.  The problem disappears when all drop-shadows are removed.  The problem does not seem to happen when running yEd in linux.

Comments

Please provide detailed OS and java version information as well as  detailed hardware information on your Mac. On our Mac mini (2.3 GHz, 8GB RAM, Intel graphics card) with OSX 10.10.2, yEd 3.14 runs without problems on Java 1.6, 1.7, and 1.8.

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It is a Macbook pro (retina, late 2013, 2.8 Ghz, 16GB ram, Intel Iris graphics) running OSX 10.10.2.  Java 8 update 31 is install on the system, but it looks like yEd includes its own JRE (also v1.8, but update 25)

Answer 1

Thank you very much for the additional information.

My guess would be that Oracle's Java does not perfom well on retina displays. (Unfortunately, we do not have a test machine with retina display available, so I cannot verify my guess.)

You could try running yEd on Apple's Java 6 for improved performance. To do that, install Apple's Java from Apple's Java for OS X 2014-001 page, then run yEd from a terminal with the command
/System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/java -jar /Applications/yEd.app/Contents/Java/yed.jar

Comments

Hello,
 I do not use MacBookPro with retina display but MacBook Air (1.87 GHz, i7, 8GB ram, OSX 10.9.5, 1920 x 1200 @ 60 Hz) and yED is extremely slow: it hangs after EVERY step! I think it is OSX related issue. Are you going to do something about it? If nothing changes I am forced not to use it anymore as I do not have soooooo much time to waste. Thanks, Maggie

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On which version of Java are you running yEd (see "Help" -> "About")?

Other users have reported that running on Apple's old Java 6 or on the very new Oracle Java 8u40 fixes these performance problems. Please see HORRIBLY SLOW on Macbook pro 15'' retina display (even though you have no MacBook Pro).